Blockchains, Cloud & Development

Bing Maps

I was trying to do some time conversions over the weekend and just found it troublesome. I’ve always had problems trying to visualise time zones and figure out if they are a day ahead or a day behind me. I tried doing a search in both Google and Bing to find the answer

Surprisingly only Google gave me an answer to what the current time in Seattle was. This got me to thinking, “If I was a member of the Bing team, how would I go about implementing a feature like this?”.

The March 2009 release of the Virtual Earth control for Silverlight (now known as the bing map control) was a great release. Up until then, projects like Deep Earth were trying to provide us with a way to use deep zoom + the virtual earth tiling to allow us to build Silverlight apps. Now Microsoft have given us an official control to play with.

One of the big downsides of the official control was the lack of databinding. You still had to add / remove your pushpins & shapes manually just like you would with the AJAX version. There is code available on the Microsoft website that adds dependency properties to the Bing Maps control which expose ItemsCollection, ready for you to databind to. If you combine this with some custom datatemplates, you are able to databind directly to the map as you would expect.